Oak Point Agronomics

Old old cat Natalie left us yesterday. Not “left” as in died, though I think this is most likely the case. “Left” as in I let her out early in the morning, as I have almost every morning for years, she walked around the corner of the house, and hasn’t been seen since. Nat the Cat is (was?) old, though nobody knows quite how old since we’re at least her fourth family. She wandered over to my son’s place here at Oak Point from where she was raised–or at least was staying at the time–and simply stayed. When Matt moved to Pennsylvania we didn’t think she’d want to move since Matt had married into three other cats, so my father, who lived next to Matt here at the Point, took her in.

By this time Nat had some age on her, and my father had a lot of it on him, so they were a good match. Several years ago my father passed away and Natalie finally had to leave Oak Point and come live with us some 130 miles away. She tolerated it OK, toleration being something felines do pretty well when there’s no alternative, but Oak Point was always home to her. Since I retired two years ago Natalie has moved south to Virginia with us each winter, grudgingly I think, but very obviously happy every spring when we move back to Oak Point. She’d been with us for 15 years, and came to us as an adult. We have owned a dog and have had several cats own us, but Nat the Cat is by far the best pet we’ve ever had. One of her favorite places, especially during inclement weather, was curled up on my wife’s computer desk between the keyboard and monitor, making it very convenient to receive attention. Katy brushed her every night, and Nat spent every evening curled up next to her on the sofa, and at our feet every night.

Nat had lost quite a bit of weight in the past few weeks, and we were going to take her to the veterinarian yesterday for blood tests. My daughter-in-law is a small animal vet and sight unseen gave potential diagnoses of worms, kidney disease, diabetes or cancer. Since we don’t think it was worms, and all of the other most likely causes have very grim prognoses, perhaps it’s best that Nat decided to take matters into her own hands. Or paws. Whatever. What I think happened, and (since it’s been almost to days) at this point hope happened, is that she found a comfortable place in the shade and went to sleep for the last time.  I tell myself that this is a better outcome for all of us, Nat and Katy and me, since the alternatives were suffering or euthanasia. This is all true, but it still hurts.

Earlier this year I noted with concern that Penn State had closed one of its Cooperative Extension county offices. Since then, in the midst of the worse recession in 80 years, the situation has grown much worse, with further cutbacks in Pennsylvania as well as severe cutbacks in a number of other states. This is affecting both county and regionally-based Cooperative Extension programs as well as Extension faculty based at state universities.

I worry about this short-term since where are farmers going to get unbiased technical advice? Ask a chemical company rep what herbicide you should use and he/she will certainly mention one of that company’s products. Ask a fertilizer salesman if you can cut starter fertilizer rates to the bone in high-fertility fields and you might get a slightly different answer than you would from an Extension agronomist. But I also worry about this long-term, since capable people will be less likely to choose a profession with such crummy job security. And even if they start out in Extension, seeing what’s happening around them would seem to make job offers from agribusiness a lot more attractive. Just when they’re starting to accumulate the experience that only comes with time, they leave for greener pastures, so to speak.

This last issue is one that really troubles me, because in agriculture–as in many other fields–there’s tremendous value in the experience gained simply from sticking around year after year, watching and learning from others as well as (especially for agronomists) noting the effects of weather conditions on field and forage crops.

Last winter at a farmer meeting where we were guest speakers, the University of Wisconsin’s Extension Agronomist Dan Undersander and I were commiserating about the state of our industry. Dan is an immensely popular speaker on a wide variety of forage topics, has been for a generation or more. (In fact, I think it’s been at least that long since he’s needed a comb!) He’s an invited speaker at forage meetings near and far, as am I. Since he’s been on many regional and national Extension and State University-related committees and “knows the players”, to coin a phrase, I asked Dan: “How many are there of folks like you and me, who speak on a wide range of field and forage topics?”  He thought  for no more than a few seconds and said: “Well, there’s you and there’s me. That’s about it.” I don’t know if that’s completely true, but if not it’s probably close, because while I’m “mostly retired” I still speak at two dozen or so farm meetings per year, both in the Northeast and just about anywhere else in North America where they have dairy cows and grow corn or alfalfa. At dairy meetings I’m usually the only crop-oriented speaker, while at meetings with a forage focus the other speakers (almost all university faculty) are very capable in their area of specialization but don’t ask the “weed guy” about alfalfa weevils or corn hybrids or the proper time to harvest second cut alfalfa.

I know, I know…perhaps I’m just an old f….. uh, fellow, longing for the past and worrying about the future. But as Hobbes once said (Calvin and Hobbes): The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

The year was 1963, and I was a Summer Assistant 4-H Agent in Fairfield County, Conn. One of that summer’s 4-H projects was raising capons for meat. In case you didn’t know, capons are neutered chickens. I knew nothing about chickens in general or capons in particular except that I was supposed to go to one farm and pick up a  delivery truck, to another farm and pick up the wooden crates, and then to another place to pick up the capons. (The two full-time 4-H Agents were smart enough to avoid this trip entirely, which should have told me something right there.) I was to haul the capons to the county fairgrounds where the 4-H kids and their parents would pick up their individual allotments. It was one of those hot, humid Connecticut summer mornings, and it was only to get hotter and more humid.

The truck was an old stake-body with no protection from the wind. Oh, well, at least the birds would get some fresh air. Upon arriving at the “crate place”, I was surprised that there were a whole pile of crates! Boy, these kids must have ordered a lot of capons. I arrived at the chicken place and started loading capons, quite a few birds to a crate. The only way I could fit all the crates onto the truck was to stack them several deep, solid from front to back and side to side. Then I left for the fairgrounds, which was quite a long drive. By this time of the day the temperature was in the 90s, with the humidity pretty close to that. I figured faster was better and lit out, leaving a stream of white feathers in my wake. 

The capons apparently did not enjoy the trip (neither did I), and by the time I got to the fairgrounds some of them were in sorry shape since the crates on top had airflow to the max while the ones in the middle didn’t have much of any. In fact, it looked like some of the capons didn’t survive their ordeal, with a few crates of birds worse than the others. Therefore, some sorting was necessary to ensure that there wasn’t more than one bird per crate that had expired, or nearly so. (A 4-Her is fair, even in the face of adversity.) This  situation was distressing, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

Being completely ignorant about bird physiology I thought they that chickens were like fish; their eyes would stay open regardless of whether they were alive or dead, and the kids wouldn’t be able to tell the difference until after they got home. But I soon got a shock: Chickens got eyelids! And when they go to that great Chicken Coop in the Sky, they do so with closed eyelids. My response to a couple of the 4-Hers, noting a prone capon with closed eyelids: “Maybe it’s sleeping.” What the heck, maybe it was…

Last fall I shattered my wrist in a fall from a tall ladder, the result of an activity so inane that you will not read the details of it here. The break required extensive surgery involving a titanium plate, screws, and many pins since they had to piece my radius back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

I’ve been a serious though minimally skilled golfer for over 50 years, during which time I’ve always had either a fade (when things were going well) or a banana-shaped slice (when they weren’t). Prior to surgery I kiddingly asked the orthopedic surgeon that since he was going to have to reconstruct the bones in my wrist, could he perhaps position the titanium plate so that I’d have a draw instead of a slice?

Well, as the saying goes Be careful what you wish for. Because whether he did screw the plate in on an angle or if something else changed drastically, ever since I started playing again after a 3-month recovery period, damned if I haven’t traded a slice for a draw!  A draw at best; far too often, a banana-shaped hook. The result is that I’m still playing far too many second shots “from the shade”, as they say, except that now I’m in the woods to the left of the fairway, not the right. I’m now seeing parts of courses I never knew existed, including interesting rock formations, previously undiscovered (by me, at least) bodies of water, and in one woodsy expedition resulting from a towering hook, the place Where Elephants Go to Die . The only upside is that the several other members of my golfing family are also hookers (remember we’re talking golf here), so I get to spend more quality time with them between tee and green. However, “quality time” is perhaps too generous a term when the whole group is poking around in the underbrush searching for their errant shots.

This year most regions of the Northeast have had an unusually early spring; warm conditions and below-normal rainfall. This has resulted in corn going into the ground in April in places where this seldom occurs, and much more corn planted by May 1st in places where April corn planting commonly occurs but only with limited acres. I’ve heard of more farmers than ever who essentially corn planting in April.

Is this the new reality of climate change and global warming? I think not. What has changed a bit is seed corn’s tolerance to cool spring soil conditions, not the least of which is due to much better seed treatments. The old planterbox treatments are not a good match with plateless and air planters, and it might not be a stretch to say that especially with air planters the pour-on powders are all but useless. I wish I could find that old research report done in the midwest where ag engineers determined that only about 25% of planterbox treatments remained on seed corn by the time the seed was planted by a finger pickup planter. For air planters it was even worse–a whopping 8%. I lost the report but well remember the numbers because they’re so shocking.

Plant breeders also have played a part; for instance, one of Cornell University’s corn breeders’ efforts have been to develop inbreds that are more cold-tolerant. Judging from how well much of this extra-early corn has done, their efforts have been successful.

But in the end much of the reason for earlier and earlier corn planting is simply that farmers have become more aggressive in their planting time decisions. Maybe I’m an old fogey–correct that; I am an old fogey–but I get concerned when a farmer 15 miles south of the Canadian border in Northern NY has 500 or more acres of corn planted, much of it in clay loam soils, by April 20th. Too many of our decisions are influenced by the previous year’s results. Plant a bit of corn in mid-April and it does real well? Let’s plant a lot more in mid-April this year! It’s been a while since most areas of the Northeast have had a long stretch of cold, wet weather in late April/early May. Sooner or later this will happen, though–we all know it will. Then we’ll find out just how good these super-seed treatments and cold-tolerant corn hybrids are.

It just doesn’t seem fair: Our Creator gave men highly convenient exterior plumbing, while He gave women an extra layer of f-f-f uh… adipose tissue.

Speaking of which: The other day I had a follow-up visit with my dermatologist to check on some skin lesions that he froze off last year. After he determined that all was OK, I heard him say: “Would you like me to give you a genital checkup?” Well, he hadn’t done anything like this the first time he saw me and it sounded a bit strange, so I hesitated, thinking that if skin cancer is caused by excessive exposure to the sun, that’s one body part where, as they say, The Sun Never Shines. Sensing my indecision, he said ”That’s perfectly OK, you can refuse the exam and I’ll just note that on your chart.” The rest of the conversation went like this:

“Well, I guess it’s OK if you check my genitals.”

“GENITALS? I said I wanted to give you a GENERAL checkup. I’ll have to be more careful about saying that word.”

“No, it’s OK, doc…I just had a complete physical exam by my GP and she was all over me, so be my guest.”

“No, I don’t need you to….Oh. Well, everything seems to be fine. You can pull up your pants now. “

Forty years ago Walt Kelly’s Pogo, our favorite possum, commented that “We have met the enemy….and he is us.” This certainly applies to the U.S. dairy industry, which just can’t seem to stop producing more than consumers are willing to consume. That’s because farmers make decisions based on what’s best for their operation, not what’s best for the industry as a whole. An empty stall is a no-no, and if there is some modest trimming of herd size (often simply reducing overpopulation of free stalls), the result is more bunk space per cow and more quality forage to go around. The result of which is—voila!—more milk per cow. And that’s just what has been happening of late.

A USDA’s effort of many years ago was to pay farmers to trim herd size without necessarily eliminating herds. The idea was to cull the bottom of the herd, and if a farm reduced milk sales by at least a certain amount the farm would get a payment from USDA. Sounded good, and many herds did so. But a year or so later there were all those empty tie stalls (or underpopulated free stalls) and a bunch of springing heifers ready to fill them. Which do you think would produce more milk: A cow at the bottom of the herd or a fresh heifer? And of course the heifer is is almost always genetically superior to the cow the farmer culled. Therefore, this attempt at curtailing production was a dismal failure, and the USDA’s next attempt, a few years later, was more draconian:

Namely, the Dairy Termination Program (AKA “The Buyout”). This one eliminated whole herds of cows, preventing both their sale to other U.S. dairy farms and the farmer from restarting a dairy on the same farm, at least not anytime soon. (Farmers could sell their herds for dairy purposes to farmers in other countries. In Northern N.Y. this meant Canada, of course, and that’s what some Buyout  farmers did.) Farmers accepted into this program, based on competitive bids, would be paid so much per hundredweight of milk for “permanently” exiting the dairy business. Sounded good, especially to farmers nearing retirement who were going to sell out in a few years anyway! Therefore, the list of participating farms looked much like an AARP mailing list. (In Clinton County, for instance, where I knew just about all the farms accepted into the program, about 90% of them were in this category.) And for some of the farmers who didn’t retire, “permanent” turned out not be not so permanent after all. They grew and sold crops until the program’s restrictions permitted them to go back into dairying. The immediate effects on milk production were more significant than for the previous program, but transitory—as all such programs are destined to be.

Is the solution Canadian-style supply management? Hmmm. This is looking better to a lot of nearly destitute dairy farmers, but would represent a huge change for the U.S. dairy industry, and not one that would easily be undone. But it might be the only one that dairy farmers can’t doom to failure by the simple act of trying to maximize economical production on their own farms.

At a recent farm meeting I met a young lady who recently left a Virginia Cooperative Extension position for a job with a multinational agribusiness. She said she liked her new job, and the timing was certainly right because the county Cooperative Extension office was being closed due to the severe shortage in available state funds. Note that this wasn’t a cutback: The whole county Extension program is being eliminated.  

This certainly isn’t the first Extension office to be closed and unfortunately it almost certainly won’t be the last. As an old Extension educator, every one of these offices that closes bothers me. Once eliminated, I expect it would take a huge increase in economic prosperity for a closed Cooperative Extension office to rise from the ashes.

Less dramatic but almost as damaging are the sweetheart deals being offered for early retirements of seasoned Extension workers. The way it’s supposed to work is that the old educate the young, passing on what they’ve learned to their eventual replacement. However, it’s cheaper to pay a entry-level professional than one with a quarter-century or more of experience, so it just makes good fiscal sense to offer early retirement incentives. However, what often happens is that there’s too little time for the “old guy” (or gal) to pass on the wisdom of the ages. Learning from your own mistakes is OK as far as it goes, but most farmers would prefer that you don’t make mistakes–even if you learn from them–on their backs!

Since I retired two years ago my wife and I have moved south for 4 months or so each winter. Last winter was typical for southern Virginia, with some cold weather (down here anything below 20F is considered frigid) but many pleasant days. On Christmas Day 2008 the temperature was in the 70s and we spent the day in the yard in shorts and teeshirts. However, this year ever since we arrived it seems that it’s either rained or snowed. The November-December period set an all-time record for precipitation, and now it appears we’ll set records for the number of “significant” snow storms.

Last year we only had one snow, about 5″ but that was all it took to close schools for several days. Municipalities simply aren’t equipped to handle snow, and days can go by before residential streets are plowed. We had a snowstorm last weekend that dumped 12″ of snow on us in about a day, and the region went into full-fledged panic, with schools closed until mid-day Thursday. Now we’re in the midst of another winter storm consisting of snow, sleet, and rain, with more snow expected tomorrow. Today (Friday) we got a total of about an inch of slush but schools were closed (yet again!), professional offices cancelled all appointments, state legislators fled the capital like rats deserting a sinking ship, and Richmond International Airport all but shut down operations for today and early tomorrow.

After a snow event it’s smart to stay off the roads, not only because many of them aren’t plowed but because so many Southern drivers simply have no idea how to operate a motor vehicle on snowy roads. My son was raised in the North Country and spent about 10 years during and after college in Buffalo, so he knows snow. But he avoids driving on snowy roads down here because of “the other guy”. Or gal.   

To a life-long Northerner it’s amusing to see how the locals react–make that over-react–to the mere expectation of snow. They make a run on supermarkets, stripping the shelves of dairy products, beer, toilet paper and other “essentials”. My daughter-in-law tried to do some food shopping the other day but couldn’t find a single parking space in the huge parking lot. I watched one of our neighbors try to clear snow from his front porch–with a garden rake.  

 We were hoping that “Virginia winter” was an oxymoron, but such has not been the case.

Once upon a time there were two brothers who were lousy dairy farmers, at lesat when it came to producing crops. They planted the wrong corn hybrids, never limed their fields, had poor weed control, and chopped their corn for silage in late August, almost a month too early.

Then a young Extension worker appeared on the scene, and helped them solve a problem. They grew to trust this fellow, and he wound up overhauling their entire crop program including changing hybrids, herbicides, liming fields for the first time, and harvesting corn when it was ready, not to be done by Labor Day. (Turns out that the reason they chopped their corn in late August was because their father always did so, and that was so he could get some free labor from his sons before they started school in September.)

Aided by a couple of years with good growing seasons, just about everything the Extension worker recommended seemed to work; both crop yield and quality increased considerably, and the brothers soon became more prosperous. So much so that they bought at least one Cadillac and two Harvestore silos. Did these purchases overextend them financially? At any rate, before long they weren’t able to pay their bills in spite of continuing to grow much better crops than before the Extension worker appeared on the scene. Eventually they sold their cows and went out of farming entirely.

In trying to help the brothers did that young Extension worker really do them a favor? If he’d never set foot on the farm, would they have continued to muddle along as they’d been doing for quite some years? I wonder about this, because about forty years ago I was that Extension worker.